In a plodding portrayal that is reverent to a fault, Grant, a writer for ESPN, chronicles the challenges and triumphs of Tyrone Willingham’s first year at the helm of the nation’s most storied college football team: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Grant highlights the significance and pressure on Willingham as the school’s first black coach in any sport, and he does provide the requisite behind-the-scenes glimpses of the program that are sure to pique the interest of any Irish fan. Indeed, one of the most engrossing incidents features Willingham derisively breaking down tape of his former team, Stanford, and clearly laying the blame at the feet of its new coach. But the writing itself is formulaic and dull. Aside from painful extended metaphors like describing Willingham and the team as a jazz combo, Grant occasionally strays from his otherwise distant, professional tone with awkward dips into slang that he seems to think sports talk demands. He refers to Touchdown Jesus, a mosaic on the university library, as having a “certain bling-bling”; he describes an opposing receiver as getting “truly Heisman on their asses”; and at one point he bizarrely refers to Willingham as “the most popular Negro in America.” In addition, Grant is so adoring of Willingham that the coach hardly comes across as human. Grant played football for him at Stanford, and a first-person player’s perspective would have been revealing. The book has enough details and anecdotes to keep a rabid Notre Dame fan turning pages, but it will hardly be of interest to a wider audience or leave much of a mark in the realm of sports literature.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The football team at Notre Dame, once among the best in the country, has had a rough couple of decades. After slipping lower and lower in the standings, the team was badly in need of a boost. Enter Tyrone Willingham, the school’s first black football coach. Against heavy odds and the preconceptions of a lot of people, Willingham led the team to 10 victories in 2002 and an appearance in a major bowl game. If the Fighting Irish haven’t quite been restored to their Rockne-era glory, they have certainly made remarkable strides in just one season. Written by a sportswriter and former footballer who played under Willingham in the late 1980s, this account follows the Irish through the 2002 season. The game-by-game reports are standard sports fare, but the portrait of Willingham is more memorable. Grant captures the excitement of college football through the lens of a man whose love of the game, whose sheer exuberance in the face of often-daunting odds, brought an entire team, if not an entire school, back to life. David Pitt
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
When Notre Dame chose Ty Willingham as their new football coach at the end of the lackluster 2001 season, few believed he could turn around the underperforming team.Willingham did that and much more, restoring Notre Dame to the national spotlight and giving the Irish’s millions of fans a sense of pride and mission for the first time in years. Along with doubling the team’s number of wins, Willingham vigorously rebuffed the conventional wisdom that the dearth of black coaches in college and professional sports was due to a lack of available talent.The first black coach ever hired by Notre Dame in any sport, he became the biggest sports story of 2002 and gave emphatic notice that he is a major force to be reckoned with in the years ahead. In RETURN TO GLORY, Alan Grant, a young sportswriter who played football under Willingham at Stanford, takes readers inside Notre Dame’s program as no one has seen it before.He masterfully recreates, week by week, the drama of a team playing above all expectations and the maneuverings of a master strategist facing the biggest challenge of his life.Notre Dame fans and general readers caught up by Notre Dame’s storybook season will make RETURN TO GLORY the best-read football book of the year.
Return to Glory: Inside Tyrone Willingham’s Amazing First Season at Notre Dame 
The New Gold Standard: Charlie Weis and Notre Dame’s Rise to Glory
From the most storied school in college football history . . .
The Gold Standard — abandoned by most of the world in the 1930s — has been an article of faith in South Bend, Indiana, for almost a century. Mere winning records and second-tier bowl games? Not good enough for Fighting Irish fans. No college football program has produced more national championships, more consensus All-Americans, and more Heisman Trophy winners than Notre Dame. But recently, not so much: no national championship since 1988 and a combined 1113 record in the 2003-2004 seasons. So out went Tyrone Willingham, fired just three years into his tenure, the first Irish coach ever to be dismissed before the end of his original deal. In came Charlie Weis, a forty-eight-year-old Notre Dame grad with four Super Bowl rings as an assistant coach. Weis proved, in the space of a single season, to be a football maestro with a hard edge, a brilliant mind, an affinity for detail, and an uncanny sense of how to motivate people. He returned a program mired in the blahs to its rightful (and historic) place among college footballs elite. This book takes you inside a season unlike any other in Fighting Irish history — and inside Weiss master plan for restoring the Gold Standard in South Bend.
From the most storied school in college football history . . .
The Gold Standard — abandoned by most of the world in the 1930s — has been an article of faith in South Bend, Indiana, for almost a century. Mere winning records and second-tier bowl games? Not good enough for Fighting Irish fans. No college football program has produced more national championships, more All-Americans, and more Heisman Trophy winners than Notre Dame. But recently, not so much: no national championship since 1988, only one All-American since 1994, and a combined 1112 record in the 2003-2004 seasons. So out went Tyrone Willingham, fired just three years into a five-year contract, the first Irish coach ever to be dismissed before the end of his deal. In came Charlie Weis, a forty-nine-year-old Notre Dame grad with no head coaching experience but four Super Bowl rings as an assistant coach. Weis proved, in the space of a single season, to be a football maestro with a hard edge, a brilliant mind, an affinity for detail, and an uncanny sense of how to motivate people. He returned a program mired in the blahs to its rightful place among college footballs elite. This book takes you inside a season unlike any other in Fighting Irish history — and inside Weiss master plan for restoring the Gold Standard in South Bend.
The New Gold Standard: Charlie Weis and Notre Dame’s Rise to Glory
